Month: February 2006

Too many channels of communication

I’ve been feeling a bit beseiged and fragmented by excessive simultaneous communications recently. It makes me feel a bit wired – just as I’ve started one thought, I get interrupted by another channel of communication. So I’ve decided to do something about it:
My first step was enumerating all channels through which I communicate. In no particular order:

  1. Blog
  2. RSS
  3. SMS
  4. Cellphone
  5. EMail JRC
  6. Email Google
  7. IRC
  8. MSN
  9. Land line work
  10. Land line home
  11. Face to face
  12. Shouting through my office wall
  13. Web
  14. Snail Mail
  15. Internal Mail
  16. Newspaper
  17. TV
  18. Google mail notifier
  19. Office nuclear emergency system.
  20. Calendar reminders.
  21. Mp3/podcast

Continue reading “Too many channels of communication”

Intelligent Design

All the discussion about intelligent design versus evolution misses one important point in my opinion. That is, if there were a designer, then IMHO, whoever it is, clearly isn’t very intelligent.
– Speed limit of 3X10^8
– Only one planet viable for life among trillions in the known universe.
– No switches for hearing, vision, smell etc…
– No modular body parts instead of being stuck with one design which is very difficult to interoperate.
– Strictly monotonic evolution.
– Murderous creatures like cats and humans who don’t appear to give a damn about the suffering of a large number of their fellow creatures.
– Design blue-prints not available for review.
– A mortal fear of death for creatures who are all going to die.
– Bad weather.
– Multiple (1000’s of) languages with the same semantics
And the list goes on….
So in the vein of the spaghetti monster argument, I’d like to suggest that we should teach SD in US schools. The pseudo-science of how the universe was created by a stupid designer, and how to do it better next time.

Some techie stuff

I found this stuff about the meaning of URIs interesting
this about identity of objects referred to by URIs – an article by Tim Berners Lee very interesting.
And this about the reference of uris (is it the page or is it the subject of the page)
I’ve always found the use of URI’s to refer to things which aren’t documents deeply disturbing. This seems to confirm my fears.
Also a new photo management tool by google is very cool (I know that google is the new microsoft, but I don’t care).